Iran

02/27/2013

QUESTION: Could you share with us any progress with the ongoing meeting between the 5+1+Iran?

MR. VENTRELL: Yeah. So we understand that the P-5+1 and Iran
met for almost three hours today, during which the P-5+1 presented a
serious, revised proposal. Further discussions also took place during
the evening, and the entire group will reconvene again tomorrow at 11
a.m. local time. And you heard the Secretary obviously speak earlier
today where he said we encourage Iran to make concrete steps in order to
begin addressing the international community’s concerns.

QUESTION: Would these concrete steps take, like, the specific suggestion by Iran that they will accept 5 percent enrichment, for instance?

MR. VENTRELL: You know, Said, I’m not going to get into the details of this ongoing diplomacy. Let’s let the negotiators do their work.

QUESTION: How would you characterize the atmosphere in the talks?

MR. VENTRELL: I don’t think I’m going to characterize it
beyond that other than to say, as I just mentioned, it went on for three
hours and further discussions will take place tomorrow.

QUESTION: Well, what do you hope to achieve at these talks? I
mean, clearly a deal is not going to be reached at this. So do you hope
to come out of it with a commitment for another round, or what are you
hoping to achieve?

MR. VENTRELL: Look, I don’t want to preview anything as we go into the second day.

QUESTION: You can’t even say what you hope to achieve at these talks? I mean --

MR. VENTRELL: Well, what we hope to achieve, and what we said all along is our goal --

QUESTION: I don’t --

MR. VENTRELL: -- is that we want Iran to change its behavior. Yeah.

QUESTION: I don’t think that’s going to happen by the end of
tomorrow. So I’m just wondering, like, what would you see as an
indicator of progress? Another round, maybe?

QUESTION: And then how do you square the fact that no matter
what comes out of these talks, tomorrow or the day after the Supreme
Leader can just say something that totally negates all the progress that
you had in the talks? We’ve seen it many times that you think you see
some positive movement from Iran, from the Foreign Minister or the
negotiator or something, and then the next day the Supreme Leader kind
of pours water on the whole thing.

MR. VENTRELL: Look, we’ve been very clear that we want the
full Iranian regime to change its behavior on this. And so we’ll
continue to meet with his appointed negotiator, the Supreme Leader’s
appointed negotiator, through the P-5+1 process. But beyond that, I
don’t have anything for you.

Why? Because it makes a moral equivalency between a democratic state under the rule of law -- Israel -- and Iran, a tyranny. It elevates the immoralities of supporting the Shah or Saddam in his war against Iran somehow above the horrors of the theocratic state of Iran today, which is responsible for massacres, arrests, torture, and assassinations abroad -- and not to mention the sponsorship of terrorists in many places.

It's like this huge, broad, blind spot on the left.

It's why the leftist narrative about the Oscars was all against Argo and in favour of Lincoln -- Slate led the charge on whining about this.

02/26/2013

The round of talks is between Iran and the so-called P5 or permanent five members of the UN Security Coucil -- Russia, China,
France, the UK, and the US -- plus an aspiring member of the Security Council who has been an elected member in the past -- Germany. It's good they're having this in Almaty and not making these diplomats hoof it to the artificially-constructed capital of Astana, which is inconvenient, I'm told.

I just don't think there's much new here, from either the US or Iran, and that Kazakhstan's presence doesn't add much.

To be sure, the Central Asian countries deal more effectively with Iran than the US. That is, they have their quarrels and boycotts and temporary cessation of rail projects (like Turkmenistan) and make-ups and problems, too, but nothing like the US.

Whenever the I-ranter comes to one of these countries, you never hear him spouting about the Jews, the Great Satan, the need to wipe Israel off the map, the scourge of Western civilization, etc. but he just talks normally and boringly like a Soviet bureaucrat about potash or rail ties, and then sometimes they'll have a carefully-choreographed spring ritual for Novruz, and maybe he'll give presents to the other potentates. But the rhetoric is completely dialed down.

What is Kazakhstan's value-add? Well, in some ways, maybe it's the new hegemon on Central Asia, and not Uzbekistan anymore, simply because it gets along with Russia better (has a big Russian minority), its economy is doing better, and Western oil companies get along better with it than, say, Turkmenistan.

Kazakhstan is considered some sort of "no nukes" state that will spread the non-proliferation idea to others. But I think that's to miss the unique circumstances that got Astana to part with its nukes: the Russian deal made at the collapse of the Soviet Union, that essentially, in exchange for your sovereignty, you have to give us your nukes. That was an offer they couldn't refuse. Kazakhstan's deal seems to have worked out better than, say, Belarus', but then, Kazakhstan is in the Soviet Re-Union efforts Putin has re-constructed and others aren't.

Here they are at State, fumbling around...

QUESTION: The talks start tomorrow in Almaty --

MR. VENTRELL: Yeah.

QUESTION: -- for the first time in a few months. And Catherine
Ashton’s office today said that they’re a serious effort to try and
break stalemate and get to – get things moving. Can you tell us what the
United States or the what the P5+1 is bringing to the table that might
make Iran rethink?

MR. VENTRELL: Well, without getting into the details, because
we need to let the negotiators do their jobs, we do have a serious,
updated proposal. And we hope that the Iranian regime will make the
strategic decision to come to the talks that start tomorrow in
Kazakhstan prepared to discuss substance so that there can be progress
in addressing the international community’s concerns. You heard
Secretary Kerry talk about this this morning, and we do have a serious
updated proposal, and our proposal does include reciprocal measures that
encourage Iran to make concrete steps to begin addressing the
international community’s concerns.

But beyond that, I think we really need to let the negotiators – our
team is out there. This will begin tomorrow morning their time, and we
need to let them do their work.

QUESTION: There are reports out there that among the measures
on the Western side, if you want to call it that, could be a lifting
sanctions on the gold and metal trades. Would that be something that you
could --

MR. VENTRELL: Beyond saying that we have reciprocal measures
that encourage Iran to make concrete steps, I’m really not going to get
into the details. We need to let our negotiators work.

QUESTION: You said, “serious, updated,” not seriously updated, right?

MR. VENTRELL: A serious, updated proposal.

QUESTION: Okay. So that doesn’t imply that it’s been dramatically altered from previous negotiations last year?

QUESTION: All right. So if you were to judge the difference
between this negotiation and the last one, the actual offer on the table
isn’t dramatically different than previously?

MR. VENTRELL: There’s nothing more that I’m going to say about the offer on the table. Let’s let our negotiators work.

Go ahead.

QUESTION: You mentioned reciprocal measures to --

MR. VENTRELL: Reciprocal measures, yeah.

QUESTION: -- to help Iran take the decision?

MR. VENTRELL: Yeah.

QUESTION: So some things will happen before Iran takes a drastic measure on UN resolutions or on stopping its nuclear program or whatever?

MR. VENTRELL: I’m just not going to get into it beyond what I said before.

QUESTION: Well, generally, do you feel optimistic going into
these talks? Is the United States hopeful that there might be a change
in the Iranian position?

MR. VENTRELL: I mean, we want them to make the strategic
decision. We’re obviously – as the Secretary said, there is time and
space for diplomacy, but it’s not infinite time, and we clearly want –
we’ve come with a serious proposal, and we want to – we hope that the
Iranians have come with the strategic decision that they’re going to
change their behavior.

QUESTION: But the fact – excuse me – but the fact that they
are using these new centrifuges, dramatically trying to increase their
enrichment capability and purity, doesn’t necessarily signal that
they’re ready to negotiate an end to their nuclear program.

MR. VENTRELL: Well, as Toria said last week, that’s a tactic they’ve used in the past coming into talks. And let’s see what happens.

QUESTION: You think it’s a tactic, or you think they’re trying
to build a nuclear – I thought you thought that the reason they were
using these centrifuges is to build a nuclear weapon?

MR. VENTRELL: I mean, clearly we have concerns about the
Iranian program. But beyond that, all I’ll say is that that’s something
that they’ve done in the past in the lead up to talks. Not necessarily
one specific action or another, but that seems to be part of their
strategy.

Okay.

QUESTION: Procedurally, what will happen tomorrow? Is it just
one day of talks, and then everyone goes away to consider their
positions? Or is there a possibility it could go to two, or --

MR. VENTRELL: The talks in the past have sometimes gone into a second day. Let’s see what happens.

Samir.

QUESTION: Do you have a readout on why Under Secretary Sherman is going to Israel?

MR. VENTRELL: I don’t have any information on that. I’ll have to look into it.

QUESTION: You guys put out a statement.

MR. VENTRELL: Oh, we have already put it out?

QUESTION: Yes.

MR. VENTRELL: I’m sorry. I --

QUESTION: She’s going to brief them on the topics. (Laughter.)

MR. VENTRELL: Anything else?

QUESTION: Wait. But you put out a statement that she will go Israel --

QUESTION: Oh. Is she going to brief them?

QUESTION: -- Saudi Arabia, and --

QUESTION: Is she going to Israel and these countries to brief them on the talks?

MR. VENTRELL: Okay. Guys, I didn’t realize in this thing we
put out announcing her travel that it included that detail. Let me look
into it. I’ll have some more information for you tomorrow.

02/24/2013

This is my little blog on Tajikistan that comes out on Saturdays. I was travelling abroad and working on a project this last month so I missed two weeks, but I hope to be back on track. If you are reading this on TinyLetter you will have to come to my blog Different Stans for the links in RU and TJ as these are blocked by this mail system. Write me at catfitzny@yahoo.com with comments or requests to be added to the mailing list.

HEADLINES

o US Secretary of State Visits Tajikistan

o Tajik President Calls on Army to Resist External Threats

o Journalist Stabbing a Warning for Tajik Opposition

COMMENTARY

Assistant Secretary of State Robert O. Blake, Jr. visited Dushanbe February 20-21 and met with President Emomali Rahmon. There is nothing on the US Embassy Dushanbe web site (yet) about this meeting, and only a picture on the Embassy Facebook page; very little anywhere else.

The independent Tajik press reported an alleged offer to make Tajikistan available for NATO equipment withdrawals, but the official did not seem very high level and later the same press reported just on the English-language page reported "Washington reprotedly does not plan to use Tajikistan’s infrastructure
during the withdrawal of its troops from Afghanistan." So the US seemed to be saying "thanks but no thanks". Too mountainous?

Into this vacuum of information steps a Russian analyst as usual, speculating that the purpose of Blake's trip was to shore up commitments from Dushanbe to let US and NATO military "obyekty" (installations) stay on the territory of Tajikistan. It's interesting that he doesn't say "troops," although there are some US "troops" in Tajikistan doing training and advising. He talks about the "obyekty" (facilities) which in a sense are what the US is already helping with by donating equipment.

The Russian analyst Anatoly Knyazev from the Institute for Oriental Studies believes the US will bribe officials and support a "thin layer" of students and nationalist intellectuals ("thin layer" is old Soviet Pravda parlance for a discredited social class not according to the Marxist-Leninist plan). This "thin layer" - the Oreo cookie filling smushed between Russia and the US and ready to be dipped into the milk of China (so I'm visualizing vividly now) is not really going to be allowed to succeed, as the US won't fund them, but they will be used to put pressure on Rahmon. Mkay.

Meanwhile, USAID is busy funding comic books in the Tajik language, so I don't think anyone's going to be colouring outside the lines...

Note that in the US photo op, Rahmon is smiling and the chandelier is featured. Note that in the Tajik photo op Rahmon is frowning and the wallpaper is featured. Also, note that the flower display at these things are always done beautifully.

The Tajik military parade last week provided an opportunity for Dushanbe to show off their hardware including some still-shiny Chaikas. Haven't seen those in awhile.

The trial of the suspect in the killing of the security official in Badakhshan last year has opened, and surprise, surprise, it's behind closed doors.

There was a bit of a kerfluffle with an Iranian presidential candidate speaking of a "Greater Iran" and Iran "taking back" Tajikistan, Armenian and Azerbaijan, but...well, when we saw the phrase "presidential candidate" we knew that this story couldn't be true, because those things are real in the Iranian dictatorship. Anyway, Ahmadineajad is coming to Dushanbe for the spring festival of Novruz in a few weeks and surely they'll sort things out. Meanwhile, we learn from RFE/RL and @eTajikistan that 29% of the 2000 plus foreign students in Tajikistan come from Iran.

U.S. Assistant Secretary for South and
Central Asian Affairs Robert Blake has called on Tajikistan's leadership
to hold a fair, democratic, and transparent presidential election in
November.

Blake started his two-day visit to Dushanbe on February 20 and has met with NGO representatives and civil-society activists.

No doubt this meeting had more people in it than Blake's meeting in Turkmenistan.

Assistant
Secretary of State for Central and South Asia Robert O. Blake, Jr. and
President Emomali Rahmon of Tajikistan, February 20, 2013. Photo by President.tj.

President.tj reports:

It was emphasized that the US continues to provide support to
Tajikistan's initiatives to intensify its struggle with terrorism,
extremism, unlawful narcotics trade, and to further assist in the
strengthening of the defense of the state borders with Afghanistan, and
material and technical provision of the relevant state agencies.

DUSHANBE, February 14, 2013, Asia-Plus -- Tajik Ambassador to the
United States, Nouriddin Shamsov, has called on Washington to remove
Tajikistan from Jackson-Vanik restrictions.

According to Silk Road Newsline, Ambassador Shamsov has noted that
Tajik economy shows steady progress, the country will officially join
the WTO on March 2, 20012 and it’s time for the United States to
graduate Tajikistan from the restrictive Jackson-Vanik amendment.

“My government anticipates continuing effective bilateral cooperation
with U.S. Government to lift as soon as possible the Jackson-Vanik
amendment which would impede as we do believe full fledged membership of
Tajikistan in the WTO and further promotion of bilateral trade and
investment relations with the Unites States of America,” Shamsov told a
panel on the WTO at the at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute (CACI) in
Washington on February 13.

Tajikistan is ready to offer its territory for transit of freight by
international allied forces in Afghanistan, and there are no obstalces
regarding this issue. Davlat Nazriev, head of the Agency for
Information, Press Analysis and Foreign Policy Planning of the Foreign
Affairs of Tajikistan announced at a briefing.

"In the event of an appeal from any country, this question will be reviewed through the established procedures," he emphasized.

The purpose of Robert Blake's visit to Dushanbe is to obtain a final decision on the issue of deploying American and NATO military facilities on the territory of Tajikistan, since the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan has already begun, and the US immediately demands hard guarantees, says Aleksandr Knyazev, coordinator of regiona programs for the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Seciences, regnum.ru reported February 20.

In the expert's opinion, "It is still not too late for Russia to stop this process, otherwise before the end of this year, another process may be initiated regarding the withdrawal of the Russian military base from Tajikistan. Evidently the US is placing its bets on Rahmon according to the principle, 'he's a bastard but our bastard," and it's understandable that they are absolutely indifferent to the nation of this regime when it's a question of the strategic plans for deploying part of the troops withdrawn from Afghanistan in the countries of the region."

Knyazev sees the situation crudely -- bribes to key officials, and support for a "thin layer of Westernized youth" and some of the intelligentsia that are "nationalist-minded" and see the West as "the lesser of two evils". This "layer" will activate "numerous Western NGOs for 'colour scenarios', not to really bring them about but as "a lever of pressure on Rahmon".

The United States Embassy in Dushanbe, Export Control and Related
Border Security program (EXBS) and Office of Military Cooperation (OMC)
provided twenty-two All - Terrain Vehicles (ATV’s), thirty-three light
trucks and additional tactical equipment to the Government of
Tajikistan. The ATV’s will be distributed to border posts throughout
Tajikistan to assist Border Guard units in their efforts to combat
contraband from entering and transiting the country. The light trucks
and tactical equipment will similarly benefit Border Guard detachments,
outposts, and units, increasing their capacity for securing the Tajik
border from external threats.

Deputy Chief of Mission, Sarah Penhune participated in a donation
ceremony at the Border Guard Facility in Dushanbe. Ms. Penhune
remarked, “The United States Government shares the goals of the
Government of Tajikistan to combat the threat of contraband and drug
trafficking and recognizes that keeping Tajikistan’s borders secure is a
national priority. The Border Guards are the first line of defense for
Tajikistan from external threats, and they are frequently required to
carry out this important work with limited resources, in very difficult
terrain, and often during very challenging weather conditions. The U.
S. Embassy EXBS and OMC programs are pleased to assist the Border Guard
in their efforts to combat the threat of contraband and drug
trafficking.”

At a meeting to honour the 20th anniversary of Tajikistan's Armed Forces, the president called on the military and law-enforcement agencies to take into account growing "threats of modernity" such as terrorism, extremism and narcotics, regnum. ru and president.tj reported.

"I have noted many times and emphasize once again that security the security of the state and nation, protecting civilian life and the socio-economic development of the country directly depends on the political situation, law and order, guarantee of the rule of law, combatting crime and protecting our boarders," the news agency Avesta reported, citing the president.

A Russian human rights activist who has worked closely with Sattori suggests
[ru] that the assault on Sattori was a “political order,” and that the
journalist was punished for his ties with Quvvatov and his recent
attempts to mobilize international pressure in order to prevent the
politician's extradition to Tajikistan. It is unclear what the
journalist himself makes of the attack. In his interview with Radio
Ozodi, Sattori said [ru] he did not know whom to blame for an apparent attempt on his life. A bit later, however, he told [ru] BBC he knew who was behind the attack, suggesting also that this was a powerful person within the Tajik government.

A court in Ukraine has ruled that former Tajik Prime Minister Abdumalik
Abdullojonov can be held in detention for up to 40 days while
authorities await documents from Dushanbe regarding his possible
extradition.

Abdullojonov was arrested on February 5 at Boryspil Airport near Kyiv on
an international warrant after arriving from the United States.

Tajikistan's Foreign Ministry has made an official announcementi n which it has condemned the statement by Ayatollah Said Muhammad Bokiri Harrozi, a presidential candidate, that in the event that he becomes president of Iran, then Tajikistan, Armenia and Azerbaijan will be returned to Iran, news.tj reported.

"They support democratic transitions in 'Kyrzakhstan' and Georgia,
mindful from our own experience that it takes a long time to get
democracy right, and that it rarely happens right away.”

In a telephone conversation Kerry also thanked Kazakhstan for agreeing to hold talks on Iran's nukes.

State.gov's transcript has it correctly as "Kyrgyzstan". But at about 30:14 or so on the video tape, you can hear Kerry make a slight muff of the name of this Central Asian country. Even so, the overall message in support of democracy, lest anyone think only the neo-cons will carry this torch, is clear:

We value human rights, and we need to tell the story of America’s
good work there, too. We know that the most effective way to promote the
universal rights of all people, rights and religious freedom, is not
from the podium, not from either end of Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s from
the front lines – wherever freedom and basic human dignity are denied.
And that’s what Tim Kaine understood when he went to Honduras.

The brave employees of State and USAID – and the Diplomatic Security
personnel who protect the civilians serving us overseas – work in some
of the most dangerous places on Earth, and they do it fully cognizant
that we share stronger partnerships with countries that share our
commitment to democratic values and human rights. They fight corruption
in Nigeria. They support the rule of law in Burma. They support
democratic institutions in Kyrgyzstan and Georgia, mindful from our own
experience that it takes a long time to get democracy right, and that it
rarely happens right away.

In the end, all of those efforts, all of that danger and risk that
they take, makes us more secure. And we do value democracy, just as
you’ve demonstrated here at UVA through the Presidential Precinct
program that’s training leaders in emerging democracies.

12/08/2012

This is my little weekly newsletter on Saturdays about Tajikistan. You can send news or comments or get it sent by email by writing to me at catfitzny@yahoo.com

COMMENT:

So the in-your-face Tajik telecommunications official Beg Zuhorov did keep his word as I reported last week and opened back up the Internet sites Facebook and RFE/RL -- after implying they could be shut any time by having announced that "the public" had complained about "extremism" (never explained precisely). It turns out some of the providers didn't even bother to follow the blocking orders, and one of them was owned by President Emmomali Rahmonov's own son. It always annoys me when a story likes this gets reported by EurasiaNet.org and others as a Bad Thing About Central Asia, and gets picked up by numerous tech sites, blogs, etc. but then the un-doing of the Bad Thing doesn't get reported. At least RFE/RL had a report about its unblocking but it was never clear what it was really all about.

While it may be only a coincidence, given how many of these types of trials are, the blockage came just as a group of people were about to go on trial for this nebulous "extremism" in Khojand (the verdict was announced after websites were running again). This seems a particularly strange and brutal case -- among the 7 defendants are two middle-aged women and their minor teenage sons, 16 and 18 (the defendant was arrested before he turned 18). They all got very high sentences for "advocating the violent overthrow of the Constitutional order". Helpfully, they pleaded guilty using the exact same language of the charges in the criminal code. But we have no idea what they actually did. It's hard to picture these moms and their teenage sons throwing bombs.

I have no use for Hizb-ut-Tahir; I have absolutely no hesitation condemning it as extremist and likely cunning and duplicitous about its ultimate aims. It claims that it is merely "peacefully" going about building a caliphate, i.e. theocratic rule, but it never explains what the plans are for all the infidels who don't want a caliphate. Too often, HuT members or ex-members, as somebody always patiently explains in exasperation at your suspicions, are tried and found guilty of real crimes. Even Western countries like Germany have banned the group.

It's too bad that human rights groups and pundits who see these kinds of awful cases such as occurred in Khujand can't find a way to condemn the way the Tajik government misuses the law and persecutes people -- AND condemn the groups that seem to have gotten their clutches into ordinary poor people in this backward country. I'm quite prepared to believe that all these people involved are innocent, and even the repeat offenders at least suffered lack of due process, yet I'd like to see the literature, the activities and the groups behind these cases as well -- and I don't see anything wrong with morally condemning them and opposing them, even if the opposition should not take the form of prosecution. There is such a legion of determined do-gooders with the position that HuT is innocent because innocent people are wrongfully prosecuted over HuT that I am the only person in the metaverse with this position. I wish I had more company. If I had more company, and if especially Tajik journalists and human rights activists felt more free to condemn HuT and make the distinctions between the group's reprehensible goals and those victimized around it, I think we might see less victims.

The World Bank is telling the Tajiks to cut their already very sparse electricity consumption in half. Tajikistan is already a place with blackouts and the lights going off all the time routinely, yet it's like that old Vietnam-war joke about the Soviets writing to the Vietnamese Communists: "Tighten your belts!" Reply: "What are belts? Send them!"

This outrageous austerity program is unlikely to get consent from the Tajik government, but I really have to wonder why it is even being proposed. Yes, electricity is the cheapest in the world, but the country is also among the poorest in the world AND it is supplying some of its power to war-torn Afghanistan, which the US is usually grateful for. I guess I can think of a lot of things that might be done to save energy in Tajikistan before consumers are told to shut off their lights. It's not like they're leaving their computers and kindles and microwaves plugged in all night running. Example: are there a lot of Soviet-era huge Stalin-type giant buildings all over the place? Why are they being heated day and night? And is the government looking the other way or even taking bribes while some companies steal electricity, as they do in Uzbekistan? If I were Tajikistan, I'd stall on that outrageous World Bank proposal and tell them to get busy doing a usage and hot spots report for a year and get back to them.

Seems like the US military also wants to tell Tajikistan not to run their toasters too much: in a tweet, the Central Asia Newswire tells Dushanbe that austerity, not Roghun, is the answer. To be honest, I don't have an informed opinion as to whether it's true that Roghun is the ecology-busting monster that Uzbek propagandists claim -- who have an easier time making their case in the world media and world's institutions than Tajikistan. The World Bank has gotten stung around the world over the decades backing big, stupid, expensive, destructive dam projects, and now all that Western NGO yammering against them has caught up with them -- and they have to take it out on Tajikistan, I guess. There doesn't seem to be an international multilateral organization that seems to have the stamina to take this issue on -- neither the UN, despite the marbled heated halls of the UN Regional Centre for Preventive Diplomacy in Ashgabat, nor the World Bank, or OSCE has been able to get the traction to really decide this for the region - read: stand up to Russia, waiting in the wings, and Uzbekistan, which is nasty.

So, like a lot of things in Central Asian life, maybe it will be left to the Chinese...

Surprise -- Tajikistan is corrupt, says Transparency International in its latest report. But interestingly, it's not *as* corrupt as its immediate neighbours. There's a 20 point or more gap in their scores, even though all of them are hugging the bottom of the barrel. Now why is that? Is there a fine line between corruption that is deterred through authoritarian persecution (i.e. as in Iran, not an ideal way to handle it obviously) and authoritarian persecution that in fact only leads to corruption to get around it? (Uzbekistan). Or are their cultural factors? Or is it that if you are just too poor, with half your GDP made up of people gone abroad to work, it's hard to be corrupt?

Cue up the garden perennial story that the Russian language is dying out because somebody has made a trip to Dushanbe and has anecdotes to tell. Sorry, this old Russian-speaker isn't buying it. Maybe because I speak Russian to all the Tajiks I ever run into in New York or Washington, even 20-somethings, and they never seem surprised or angry. Now, I get it that Russian isn't being taught as much, that young people aren't speaking it as much, and so on. And there's also the living fact that actual native Russian-speakers are being driven out of Tajikistan by repression and poverty -- doctors and engineers among the ethnic Russians and Russian speakers of the old Soviet Union are forced to leave -- 3661 last year, which doesn't sound like very many, until you realize this is among the tens of thousands who have left since the fall o f the USSR, and they happen to be among many of the professionals. It's brain-drain, which isn't a surprising thing in a country where the dictator turns off Internet pages on a whim.

Even so, I think programmers for this region, whether at RFE/RL or OSI or OSCE or any institution, have really lost an opportunity due to their hatred of Russians and aversion toward the Russian language. Here was this built-in lingua-franca that you didn't have to pay anyone to teach or learn, like English, which still isn't as widespread as these planners believe. There is all kind of literature -- good, democratic literature -- published by all kinds of institutions, including even the old CIA-funded bodies like the International Literary Center, now defunct. Here's a lingua franca, by the way, that would enable these peoples to talk to *each other* and others in the CIS who might support them and at least learn about their issues. Yet the nationalists in the State Department or Soros -- the people who think that every country has to follow the path of Poland by relying on language and religion to gain freedom -- block even the most benign efforts to try to have cross-border Russian materials. The radios don't have Russian-language pages for most of the stans, except Kazakhstan, where the excuse is that there is a large Russian minority. I wonder what their traffic is on that page from all the stans? Somebody in Turkmenistan has to find out free news in Russian from RFE/RL by going to the Kazakhstan page instead of the Turkmen page. The success of fergananews.com and chrono-tm.org in Russian should succeed in making the point to these planners that they are short-sighted and misled. They could be promoting local languages while also trying to use what remains of this lingua franca to promote freedom and understanding.

Here's When to Schedule Your Trip to Dushanbe, Mark Zuckerberg

Ever diligent Facebook friends have found out the office hours of Beg Zuhurov, the brazen Tajik official who justified the closure of Facebook on the grounds that "the public was complaining too much about extremism". The official is only at his desk to meet supplicants on Saturdays from 10:00 am to 12:00 pm. Nice! So after a week's hard work, just when you might be sleeping in or spending time with your family or doing your second job to make ends meet, that's when Zuhurov's office is open!

I personally didn't give the order to block the access to the social network Facebook The Communications Service didn't give it either, but if it is necessary, the access will be closed. Every day I receive complaints from people about the contents on the network. The network does not resolve social issues, but purely commercial. Everyone remembers how the civil war began in the country, so then everything then began with criticism. We will not allow war to occur.

But there was still due diligence to be done. Fergana.com asked on December 4 whether reports from RIA-Novosti, the Russian state news agency, were true that Facebook and other Internet sites were unblocked.

"Access to Facebook is unblocked by the state Internet provider Tajik-telekom," Asomuddin Atoye, head of the Tajik association of Internet providers. "If the state Internet-provider has unblocked Facebook, then I'm sure there will be permission from the Communications Service for other providers and operators as well," Atotyev said.

Radio Liberty's Tajik Service Radio Ozodi reported that it was blocked on December 1, and apparently later that it had been unblocked, fergananews.com reported. RFE/RL confirmed that the site was unblocked on December 3. This apparently happened after Tajik state agency for communications sent out SMS messages with "a demand to unblock the site". Fergananews.com was still trying to check whether this was true on December 4, and also discovered that some providers had never blocked the sites in the first place.

Fergananews.com says a source reported:

"You know why? Because, for example, the Saturn-Online provider belongs to the son of the president of the country, Rustam Emomalievich, and the Ministry of Communications doesn't touch that company."

Evidence is mostly anecdotal, but the linguistic changes are
obvious to Tajiks who have been away for years. This past summer, for
example, Ruslan Akhmedov wanted to sell an apartment he inherited, so
returned to Dushanbe from a small Russian town where he's lived for most
of his adult life. "I placed an ad in a local paper indicating my phone
number," Akhmedov recalled. "Out of about thirty people who called me
during the first couple of days, only three or four easily switched into
Russian. With the others, I had to communicate in my primitive Tajik.
Regrettably, I've almost forgotten the language."

However, it can happen only on condition that these interests are timely and duly formulated, the Russian president added.

Developing
the topic of international cooperation, Vladimir Putin told the
participants that they should develop and promote a common agenda in
various other international organizations, such as the OSCE.

Putin added that the current situation in this organization “was not a source of optimism”. “OSCE
should have long ago stopped servicing the interests of certain
countries and concentrate its attention on unification issues,” the Russian leader said. Putin also expressed hope that when Ukraine takes it turn to chair the OSCE in 2013 it would promote this very position.

The anticorruption group Transparency
International (TI) says high levels of bribery, abuse of power, and
secret dealings continue to “ravage” societies around the world, despite
a growing public outcry over corrupt governments.

The annual Corruption Perceptions Index,
published on December 5 by the Berlin-based group, shows that
two-thirds of 176 countries are perceived by citizens to be highly
corrupt.

Tajikistan is among them, of course. But as you can see from the map, it ranks only 157, by contrast with its neighbours Turkmenistan, at 170, and Afghanistan, at 174, Uzbekistan at 170, but not as good as Iran, at 133 and just a tad worse than Kyrgyzstan which is at 154.

3,661 people have left Tajikistan for Russia under the Russian
national program to assist the voluntary resettlement of
fellow-countrymen living abroad to the Russian Federation since 2007.

According to the Russian Federal Migration Service (FMS)’s office in Tajikistan, 62 percent of them have higher education.

So these are ethnic Russians or Russian speakers of other "nationalities", i.e. not Tajiks or Tajik-spakers.

Speaking at the meeting, Viktor Sebelev, the head of FMS’s office in
Tajikistan, noted that 30 percent of those who had left Tajikistan for
Russia under the mentioned program were technical and engineering
employees and 15 percent physicians. 30 percent of physicians that have
left Tajikistan fro Russia have scientific degrees.

Asia-Plus reports December 8 that in Khujand, seven people have been tried for "extremism," accused of membership in Hizb-ut-Tahir, which is a "banned religious extremist party" under Tajik law (in Russian).

Judge Shukhrat Akhrorov said that the sentences were announced in investigation-isolation building no. 2 in Khujand, and that among the convicted were three women and one minor. Most of them pleaded guilty in exactly the language of the law itself, including "the forcible change of the Constitutional order," said the judge.

Among them were two Chkalovsk residents, Islom Boboyev, 16, and Sukhrob Khafiz, now 18, were sentenced to 6 and 10 years incarceration, respectively, and were serve their terms in prison colonies under "strict" and "common educational" regimes, respectively.

Thirteen Afghan citizens are now in custody, the minister said. There
has been no official statement on any Tajiks arrested in the operation,
although two Tajik women who had been taken hostage by the drug
traffickers were released.

The World Bank has advised authorities in Tajikistan to hike
electricity prices by 50 percent as part of its solution to the
country’s perennial winter power crisis, local media reported on
Tuesday.

The study, entitled “Tajikistan’s Winter Energy Crisis: Electricity
Supply and Demand Alternatives”, notes that aside from the country’s
inability to meet energy requirements, consumers are not incentivized to
use power carefully.

Tajikistan’s Vakhsh River valley is crucial to the livelihoods and food
security of millions of people, but the degradation of natural resources
has been persistent and extensive over the past 100 years. The tugai
forests, reservoirs of biodiversity and source of income for local
communities, have been stripped at an ever-escalating rate, either to
clear land for agriculture or as source of energy.

But UNDP stepped in with a project to reverse these trends.

After four years, an evaluation of the project found that tree-cutting
had declined by 90 percent since 2008, allowing the forest to
regenerate, while populations of birds and animals increased by 50
percent. Community members say they feel a sense of pride and ownership
in what they have been able to accomplish. "Protecting the forests is a
noble cause that should always be supported," says Bekmurodov
Kurbonmahmad, a member of the committee.

Did they stop cutting trees merely because they ran out of them? What are they using for fuel now? Animal dung? And while it's great that the animals returned, how are the people doing?

In the district of Jura Nazarov, UNDP assisted communities with other
aspects of sustainable rural development. Almost all of the district’s
14,000 inhabitants depend on farming, but more than 70 percent of the
land is no longer arable, after years of poor agricultural and
irrigation practices during the Soviet era.

Yet, UNDP says it has good news there, too:

Seventy-five percent of the respondents reported that they were able to
sell additional crops, with a 25 percent increase in income on average.
The extra funds have gone into renovating family homes, hiring farm
labour to expand production, repairing irrigation systems and sending
children to school.

From the Embassy of Tajikistan in the US. It has a nice American narrator with a mellow accent, despite that "Ta-JICK-istan" to rhyme with "ick" and will be broadcast on ABC News. The message is that with US investment and lots of mining, the region will become more stable and the relationship will grow stronger.

The harrowing account of Chen's escape, his pick-up by the Embassy diplomats who decided to give him temporary refuge, and his leaving on terms that aren't clear into a situation that worsened are all detailed in the Times.

What's really going on? Why couldn't Chen stay in the Embassy? He says officials "weren't proactive enough" and essentially asked him to leave, according to the Times. Why couldn't a US official stay with him until he's had adequate time to articulate his wishes and leave the country with his family if that is what he wishes?

There's a lot of confusion, but having been involved myself in these high-stress highly visible summit dramas between superpowers, such as with the exchange in the Soviet era of political prisoner Yuri Orlov and journalist Nick Daniloff for Soviet spies (I worked as a translator for Orlov), these things are never easy. There are always difficulties and last-minute hitches and people changing their minds about things.

I don't know if the memory of the five years with the Soviet Pentacostals in the basement of the US Embassy was still fresh in anybody's mind (it would be in the mind of Wayne Merry, the diplomat who had to live through it in Moscow!). But it's tremendously difficult. Obviously, Embassy staff want to avoid a situation where they are seen to create a magnet for asylum-seekers. In the Soviet era, there were droves of them usually arrested before they even got near the door, who were filling up the labour camps (we met them in Perm 36).

On the other hand, they can't in good conscience feed people to the wolves and if someone like Chen has made it this far, you have to stay the course. And the nature of Chen's state of mind, and his possible reversals, and his possible misunderstandings aren't the issue: he's a man by whom the US must do right.

The US has to obtain more than diplomatic assurances here; they have to have the right to accompany Chen or perhaps, failing gaining agreement for that, try to deploy an NGO volunteer as a witness to accompany him and report back to the Embassy. They must try to get them all out of the country.

I feel as if Obama's foreign policy -- such as it is -- is really falling apart now in the last part of his term. It was never sterling, and caused my growing lack of support for him.

But it's almost as if he and his people said to themselves, "Let's make a series of quick wins or QIPs (quick-impact projects or whatever they call them) across the global chessboard on a variety of problem countries, and see if we can get them to stay put until I'm re-elected."

And it's that craven, utilitarian attitude toward foreign policy as merely an instrument of domestic power that is messing it up. Sure, all politicians play foreign issues for domestic audiences. Yet to turn foreign policy purely into a campaigning platform never seems to have been done so egregiously.

First, there was the stumble with the live mike with Medvedev. "I need space" -- no standing up to the Russians -- no offset when the reset hasn't worked -- and the humiliation of having that taken up by Romney who rightly said that Russia is our major enemy *because Russia has made us its enemy* and doesn't help on a whole host of problems from Syria to Afghanistan to Iran.

Next, there was the scandal where Obama Administration officials leaked a story that may not have been true, or was only partly true, that Israel was making some deal with Azerbaijan for refueling rights in some ostensible plan related to the bombing of Iran. Than Baku could hardly make anything that stark without retaliation against the Azeri minority in Iran and a host of other problems in the region didn't seem to matter. The main thing was to send a message to both Israel and Azerbaijan not to do anything funny on Iran until Obama got re-elected.

Then there was the trip to South Korea, to stand tall on North Korea and settle things there -- which backfired and led to the North Koreans firing a (failed) missile. Not good.

Then on to Latin America, where we really looked like imperialist sexist pigs with the president's own security detail taking advantage of the local women. Everybody looks bad here, and it isn't helped by Obama joking at the White House correspondents' dinner that he had to leave soon and get the Secret Service home on their new curfew.

Then this eerie trip in the middle of the night to Afghanistan to give a press conference in a heavily guarded army compound, with little said about how the country is going to really fare or what we're going to do for it after troops are pulled out -- and then with a suicide bombing right after the presidential plane leaves.

And now this Chinese mess.

I have to wonder if there was an adequate translator here -- it sounds as if there wasn't if they can't seem to tell the difference between him saying "kiss Hillary" or "see Hillary".

04/04/2012

When I first saw EurasiaNet dutifully re-post a story from Foreign Policy, "Israel's 'Secret Staging Ground' alleging that Israel had a deal with Azerbaijan to refuel at Azerbaijan's airbases on the border with Iran, I wasn't surprised. (Baku later denied this, but EurasiaNet didn't note that yet).

That is, I wasn't surprised that Joshua Kucera of EurasiaNet was reprinting Foreign Policy -- there's a close relationship between EurasiaNet authors and Foreign Policy, where they publish. Nor was I surprised that both Foreign Policy and EurasiaNet were running a story to intensify mistrust of Israel -- the EurasiaNet tilt, like Foreign Policy, is toward the "progressive" line that is quite critical about Israel.

The author of the FP story, Mark Perry, said:

"The Israelis have bought an airfield," a senior administration official told me in early February, "and the airfield is called Azerbaijan."

But -- as Kucera reminds us -- when Israel made a $1.6 billion arms agreement with Azerbaijan, "ikely Azerbaijan's largest single arms purchase ever," he said that it "wasn't because of Iran":

The timing of the deal is misleading: regardless of the ongoing ratcheting up of tension between Israel and Iran, and increasing attention to Israel's intelligence activities in Azerbaijan, these weapons are destined to be used not against Iran, but against Armenia, which controls the breakaway Azerbaijani territory of Nagorno Karabakh. Though it's tempting to think otherwise.

So Kucera denies an Iran-related motivation -- but falls for the temptation to some extent himself:

Is Azerbaijan going to use Israeli weapons against Iran? No chance. Azerbaijan has nothing to gain by attacking Iran, or even by cooperating with an Israeli attack except in the most discreet possible way.

Except in the most discreet possible way, you see. As Kucera adds:

The exception would be if Azerbaijan's influence were so discreet as to allow Baku some plausible deniability; then Iran probably wouldn't stand to gain from attacking Azerbaijan. According to the FP report, the most likely use for the Azerbaijan airfields would be so that Israeli aircraft could land there after an attack, obviating the need for mid-air refueling en route to Iran, which Israel isn't particularly experienced with and which would reduce the amount of weapons the planes could take on each sortie.

I wondered if this was a clever new kind of plausible-deniability deterrence -- if true -- or a clever new way to claim you don't think Israel is going to do something bad -- and then claim in fact it secretly will.

What I was most puzzled about, however, regarding the FP piece and the subsequent piece in The Bug Pit was this: why didn't they mention the sizeable Azeri population within Iran?

There are at least 16 million Azeris in the south of Iran (there are no official numbers on this revealed but they are believed to make up 24 percent of the population); they travel frequently across the border to Azerbaijan, where it's like a vacation for them as Azerbaijan remains a secular state and doesn't have the same strict rules. Foreign Policy mentioned this minority, but only in terms of recently fraying relations (they are always fraying over one thing and another) -- the accusations that Azerbaijan was helping Israeli agents assassinate Iranian scientists. And later, only historically, in reference to the posibility raised by retired Israeli Brig. Gen. Oded Tira of enlisting the support of the Azeri minority as a hypothetical (unlikely, as they are loyal to the regime -- they have to be, to survive).

But they didn't mention the sizeable Azeri population within Iran as a powerful deterrent to Baku not really ever embarking on anything that provocative against Tehran.

Indeed, the Azeris of Iran are hostages to anything that Israel and Azerbaijan might do that Iran might not like. Tehran can and does retaliate against them every time there are escalation of tensions in Caspian Sea conflicts, for example -- we've seen this time and again with various scandals -- Azerbaijan makes a pipeline deal that Iran doesn't like, or moves towards positions that Iran doesn't like on Caspian controversies, and they threaten to retaliate.

The FP report cites a "a senior retired American diplomat who spent his career in the region and "four US military intelligence officers". There is a lot of detail but it's mainly citing research on the hypotheticals.

After this report came out, I thought to myself: there's a dog not barking here -- Russia. Russia does a lot of the talking on the whole Iran nuclear issue, as an ally of Iran's, and has backslid on progress it once made ostensibly pressuring Iran -- especially as relations have worsened with the US and NATO over Libya.

Why didn't Moscow have anything to say about this supposed move to help Israel ratchet up its deterrent factor (which could also double as a provocation ratcheting up tensions, of course, like all deterrents in the nuclear game)?

Azerbaijan is Russia's ally and close partner on some things (energy) -- and Russia never really seems able to end the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict by pressuring Azerbaijan, although as a nominally Christian-majority nation it is historically perceived as Armenia's ally as well. Periodically Russia seems to imply it won't help solve that conflict if it doesn't get its way on this or that gas or pipeline project. For that matter, Russia is now better friends than it used to be with Israel. Wouldn't it have something to say? It didn't...

Veteran Israeli journalist Ehud Yaari has written in the Times of Israel claiming last week’s bombshell from Foreign Policy magazine about Azerbaijan’s willingness to allow Israel to use its air bases to strike Iran was pure fiction...But though Yaari presents some good arguments why it might not be true, unlike magazine author Mark Perry, he offers no sources or reporting to back up his assertion.

Commentary author Jonathan S. Tobin himself reported the story and found it plausible at the time (like FP and EurasiaNet, although Commentary is pro-Israel). He didn't mention the Azeri-hostage factor, either, but he probes in a different direction:

Unless you are willing to believe, as perhaps Yaari and others disputing its authenticity do, that Perry is lying about the fact that senior officials in the Obama administration leaked the story to him, it’s still important to ask why they did so. What possible motive could they have had?

While the story could be true, shining such a spotlight on it, reasons Tobin, reveals:

the willingness of Obama’s minions to circulate the tale speaks volumes about the off-the-record malevolence that lurks beneath the surface of the president’s current charm offensive aimed at Jewish voters.

I don't think you have to scratch too hard on that surface to see the malevolence, judging from the Battle of the Think Tanks recently in Washington, where Center for American Progress and AIPAC and others related on each side of the Israel-Palestine issues battled fiercely on Twitter and the blogosphere, in the end, each side sacrificing staff. You could also look at the 771 plus comments under Perry's article -- the antisemites and conspiracy loons are having a field day.

Iran’s friend Turkey is not likely to permit the Israeli Air Force to fly over its territory to get to the Azeri bases.

While he doesn't mention the 16 million Azeris as such, Yaari does mention yet another regional enclave factor -- Nakhchivan, the Azeri enclave borderd by Iran from which Azerbaijan is cut off by Armenian territory. As Yaari points out, it is useful to open up a map and look at this.

It's my belief that among the biggest factors restraining Baku from providing any huge support for Israel in terms of a possible pre-emptive strike are a) the Azeri minority held hostage b) Russia's disapproval. At the end of the day, Russia cares more about Iran than Israel, and so does Azerbaijan. It's next door. They're the ones that have to live with the Day After.

I'm taking for granted that the hostage factor is a huge restraint, but I'm willing to consider other alternatives based on the brutal pragmatism of this region's tyrants, and their sheer disregard for their own people, even in their own countries. But the belief that minorities can be held hostage and used as pawns is at least as old as Stalin's Prisonhouse of the Peoples, and part of the reason he chopped up the map with so many odd enclaves was to play people off against each other.

When Tajikistan arrested two Russian pilots and accused them of carrying contraband, as part of a larger dispute with Russia about payments for a base and the uneasy relationship with Russia's military presence on their soil, Russia instantly retaliated by saying they'd expel 10,000 Tajik labor migrants from Russia. That's how they roll. Of course, they have their own Russian hostage-population in Turkmenistan, and that has sometimes been a factor in their gas deals with Ashgabat, but lately, since the deterioration of relations after failure to get a price deal in 2009 and mutual acrimony over a pipeline explosion, the Kremlin hasn't done anything for the Russians trapped in Turkmenistan as Ashgabat doesn't recognize their dual citizenship and wants to force them to take new Turkmen passports.

Each one of these countries seem to have each others' titular nationality group, as they call it, in the form of a minority in their own country, and they play on it. But my point here is that you may not be able to count on them going to bat for their own when the chips fly.

Even so, I continue to think the deterrent factor is big on both fronts -- Baku is not going to deliberately harm their fellow Azeris lightly, or cause a huge influx of refugees they can't take care of -- they are still taking care of refugees from the past twenty years of crises. Nor will they fly in the face of what Russia wants.

02/17/2012

Sadly, David Rieff pretty much gets it right with his provocative article this morning, "Save Us From the Liberal Hawks" (whose URL contains the phrase "Syria Is Not Our Problem."

As he says, in argument against military intervention to stop crimes against humanity in Syria:

If the looming victory of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the failure of the democratic project in Iraq, and the fact that the most significant political outcomes of the Arab Spring in Egypt, Yemen, and Libya have been instability and the victory of political Islam have not chastened them -- and clearly they haven't -- nothing will.

I agree. Human rights activists have to think of this, and be accountable. With largely uncritical support of the Arab Spring, with support of the NATO intervention in Libya, and now support of some military intervention in Syria, they are helping to usher in systems through massive violations of human rights. This has prompted Brazil rightly to talk now in the UN Security Council about "responsibility WHILE protecting." When we intervene, then we have ownership of these governments that are then more massively violating human rights than the previous autocrats. That should pose more of a challenge to the human rights ethos than it does.

As I wrote in 2009 in objection to Gareth Evans on Open Democracy, Responsibility to Protect (RTP) is an insidious doctrine as it implies that bad actors will act to protect their own people, which they won't, and that good actors will somehow avoid massive human rights violations in waging RTP wars, which they won't -- or that the results are pretty -- which they have never been.

We should at least wait to see if any of these other situations where we intervened and are losing ever improve before trying it again.

The religiosity of RTP has prompted Ken Roth, director of Human Rights Watch, now to call for us to "nurture the rights-respecting elements of political Islam" as if we can count on such rights-respecting.

The obsession with RTP intervention is preventing us from thinking about other means, such as putting pressure on China and Russia in other ways.

This is in sharp contrast to Anne-Marie Slaughter and other enthusiasts of RTP who have been strenuously calling on Twitter to "do something," with urgent argumentation against the realpolitickers like Joshua Foust -- who doesn't then have another plan to put pressure on Russia (or China) because he's generally uncritical of Russia (for him Georgia is always worse, etc.)

The massacres in Syria should be among the many reasons we really review the terms of the "reset" with Russia (and certainly not do things like "abolish" Jackson/Vanik when we can just simply declare that Russia has graduated from it). While it's unglamorous, we should return to the more patient type of human rights of the Cold War era when we had to combine rhetorical condemnation and documentation and incremental progress with arms talks. We should let the Arab League do the heavy lifting on dealing with the murderous regimes in their own region. No, it doesn't provide an immediate salve to the conscience -- the regimes resulting from intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan haven't either for the last 10 years, and we should be mindful of that.

If this seems callous, go back to the half dozen failures mentioned at the top -- they should be chastening. I say "sadly" about Rieff's doctrine because I don't take any smug joy about it as some will, because it's so bleak. Nobody wants to stand by while people are murdered. But we might find ourselves in a proxy war with Russia or at least Rosvoorouzhenie (the Russian state arms supply company) in Syria that will make things worse.

As I said, an unseemly byproduct of the RTP doctrine and political human rights these days is Ken Roth's call on us to "nurture" Islamic states. He does this in much the same way as my friend Sergei Kovalev has always imagined that you could still have a socialist state even like the Soviet Union that might still be imagined to obey international human rights law. There's always been an assumption among such liberals that we can be agnostic about the social system of countries and pretend that one social system versus another isn't better about respecting basic civil rights and liberties. We'd all like this to be true. We can all show it to be false simply by looking at the Freedom House or Transparency International surveys. That doesn't mean we can argue backwards and decide to go soft on human rights criticism of Western liberal capitalist democracies because their systems ensure rights better (the Jean Kirkpatrick debate of the 1970s). But we can go to where the violations are, and admit that they should deserve the lion's share of our resources and attention.

Normally I sign their petitions, for example, in defense of Amnesty's gender advisor who was forced to leave over these issues, but this particular open letter to Roth just had a problem for me in the invocation of the idea of the "right" to separation of church and state. I agree this is a good thing to have, but it's nowhere enshrined as a "right" in international law, although it is in the US in the First Amendment. I'm all for it, I just think in the international context you have to find a different way of saying this. And I do think then you have to talk about the assumptions that certain social systems (i.e. religious or socialist) are "better" or "not good" for promoting human rights.

Roth's essay is offensve because it attempts to guilt-trip liberals reticent about endorsing the Arab Spring results as "Islamophobic":

Rather, wherever Islam-inspired governments emerge, the international community should focus on encouraging, and if need be pressuring, them to respect basic rights—just as the Christian-labeled parties and governments of Europe are expected to do. Embracing political Islam need not mean rejecting human rights, as illustrated by the wide gulf between the restrictive views of some Salafists and the more progressive interpretation of Islam that leaders such as Rashid Ghannouchi, head of Tunisia’s Nahdha Party, espouse. It is important to nurture the rights-respecting elements of political Islam while standing firm against repression in its name. So long as freely elected governments respect basic rights, they merit presumptive international support, regardless of their political or religious complexion

God speed to Rashid Ghannouchi, but Ken really ought to be more intellectually honest here and talk about the disaster that is Egypt. What are we getting in Egypt? Or for that matter, Libya? No government merits "presumptive international support". Hamas was freely elected and then didn't respect basic rights at home or abroad. Israel's government is freely elected and has a basic system of respecting human rights which Ken Roth doesn't really acknowledge given Human Rights Watch's obsession with Israel/Palestine. This is politics. Let's not pretend it's human rights. Or let us say that in fact human rights are always in fact political and drop the mask.

Roth then goes on to construct a notion of Turkey that tends to undermine his own theory:

Perhaps the most interesting new presence in the region is Turkey. Despite its distinct history, it remains a powerful example of a country with a religiously conservative elected government that has not used Islam as a pretext to undermine basic rights. Turkey has capitalized on its growing stature by entering the political fray of the Arab world. More vigorously than its Arab neighbors, Turkey denounced the political killing in Syria, championed democratic change in Egypt, and opposed Israel’s punitive blockade of Gaza.

Turkey has done those things, of course, for its own geopolitical interests and to satisfy growing conservative domestic constituents -- not because it has gotten human rights religion. And where's the bar for "rights-respecting" in the test for whether we should embrace Islamic governments, if "Islamic-inspired" Turkey still has so many problems?

Yet Turkey faces several challenges if it is to live up to its enormous potential in the human rights realm. Will it use its growing influence in multilateral arenas to oppose the outdated view of India, Brazil, and South Africa that it is somehow imperialistic to stand with people who are risking their lives to protest repression by their governments? Will Turkey press for democratic change not only among the uprisings of the Arab world but also in Iran, which crushed its Green Revolution in 2009, and the stultified and repressive countries of post-Soviet Central Asia? And will Turkey clean up its worsening human rights record at home–including persistent restrictions on freedom of speech and association, a flawed criminal justice system, and long-term mistreatment of its Kurdish minority—so it can be a less compromised proponent of human rights abroad? Turkey can make a positive difference on human rights in the region—if its leaders take the bold decisions at home and abroad needed to advance this cause.

The idea that Turkey should be the engine for democratic change in Central Asia is about as useless as having Russia, China, or for that matter the US as the engine. In most Central Asian countries, the Turkish influence has now been greatly challenged with the expulsion of not only Turkish businesses but the Turkish schools related to the Nurchilar movement. Both are seen as covers for extremism. (I'm for endorsing the rights of religious schools or "inspired" businesses such as those associated with the Gulen or Nurcilar movement, which has been expelled from Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, while also calling on this more liberal form of Islamic organization not to impose the violation of women's rights and other civil rights.)

What all of these problems come back to today is Iran, and the inability of liberals to have a reasonable containment program for Iran, rather than silly things like hoping that Turkey is going to reform Iran, or hysteria about Israel bombing Iran. You know there's a thing that you do when you can't have a hot war, and invade countries and kill thousands of people or install shakey governments that then kill thousands more people. You have a cold war.

01/19/2012

I have a hunch this is a regular story that may crop up when people need it. Or maybe it's the morals police that crop up persecuting Barbie when they need to.

Apparently, merchants still keep trying to sell this evil Western toxin, and hide the doll under the counters, says Die Standard.

Barbie has some Islamic competitors in Iran, says the daily -- Sara and Dara, who wear headscarves.

Suddenly, I remembered a day in Baku, hours before a plane was to depart, in a large department store.

I had to find my daughter some sort of durable souvenir -- the others I had bought at the market or hotel were too fragile. I cast around and I saw a Western-style Barbie -- well, it would have to do. I peered closer, and it turned out this knock-off Barbie in a bright yellow dress was also knocked-up, with a tiny little baby doll inside her tummy. Perfect!

I couldn't help thinking that the morals squad in my neighbourhood would have removed a scandalous dolly like this, especially with no visible Ken in evidence. My daughter happily played with the pair for ages -- because I rarely bought her the Barbies or their clothes. They were so inflexible and so expensive.

Last summer, the White House authorized a massive expansion of clandestine military and intelligence operations worldwide, sanctioning activities in more than a dozen countries and giving the military's combatant commanders significant new authority to conduct unconventional warfare.

Other "ex-ords" signed by combatant commanders include provisions for secret American bases and operations in countries like Georgia, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and in the Dagestan region of the North Caucuses. In the latter space, U.S. soldiers were tasked with tracking down members of identified separatist groups with loose ties to Al Qaeda. One of those groups was responsible for the March 31 bombings in Kizlyar, according to American intelligence officials.

This story sounds a bizarre. American spies and bases in Georgia and Turkey, maybe (the US already has a base in Turkey), but those other countries like Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan and Russia's North Caucuses -- that just seems incredible. Those countries have really vigilant and deadly secret police and military intelligence agencies, and I can't see them sitting still for this kind of activity.

This is almost like the old movie about the Soviet submarine invasion of Cape Cod, "The Russians Are Coming," only in reverse.

But if you read the paragraph carefully, Ambinder isn't exactly saying there are bases in these countries, or that even there is planning for bases in these countries, he's saying there are provisions for bases and operations.

That the US might view these areas as places where they should have operations in case of emergency or even as a preventive action doesn't surprise me. There have been WikiLeaks cables indicating that the US trains special operatives to assist the Central Asian regimes with anti-terrorist activity.

Of course, there's a big difference between sneaking into a country and snooping around or using remote agents from that country, and having an entire full-fledged base.

I guess what the entire liberal and left intelligentsia in the US have to face is whether they are going to stomach above-the-ground, open, large, heavy military presences in countries where lots of people get killed and lots of state treasure is expended, or whether they have the new "smart" smaller-footprint warfare with drones and more clandestine special operations that are leaner and meaner.

The choice may only be between those two kinds of options, not some ideal human-rights-proof better way.

If you had to chose between invading Iraq, killing Saddam Hussein openly, and staying in the country for the next years with large numbers of troops, fighting insurgents and terrorists who kill many of the 100,000 unarmed people to die in the war instead of fighting actual equivalent combatants OR having a crack team sneak in and assassinate a leader or head of an insurgency and some key terrorists, then go home, which would you chose? 1960s or 2000s?

The problem is almost never debated this way by the intelligentsia -- usually the "smarter, small footprint special ops" version is debated in terms of its legality under international humanitarian law and the inadvisability of having any counter-terrorism or counter-intelligence going on at all, or at least, very little.

I imagine Nobel Peace Prize laureate Obama is never going to put it to the American public this way: "Look, would you rather I had had special ops to sneak in and kill dictators or terrorist leaders by using dirty tricks and clandestine methods, and send in a few drones that may not be the most human-rights conformative machines, and get in and out there with as little jostling as possible, or would you like me to do it the legal way (warfare is legal under humanitarian law, just regulated) and send in tens of thousands of troops and tanks and bombers and fight the old-fashioned way and attract terrorists to kill tens of thousands of innocent civilians?"

That is really the political proposition, because obviously the old 19th and early-20th century method of sending in troops that only fight other troops while carefully ensuring the evacuation of civilians or at least not targeting them is not an option. It is no longer practiced.

So really the intellectual proposition has to be, whether you have that smaller-footprint and more clandestine military footprint that will attract the fire of numerous lefty bloggers irate about illegality and secrecy, and all kinds of authoritarian regimes looking for soft targets for rhetorical condemnations -- or whether you do it the old-fashioned big, open, legal way and still have some of them attack you but also ensure that tens of thousands of civilians are massacred by terrorists and rebels.

And I don't know if in fact the intelligentsia even gets to decide this, as it sounds like the Obama Administration already made up its mind.

Marc Ambinder wrote last year that the Obama administration was "reluctant to allow such expansion" as it would be associated with the Bush administration's similar disregard for international norms.

But political imperatives, the threat of terrorism, and the knowledge of what the U.S. military can accomplish if its strings are cut away has slowly changed the minds of some of Obama's senior advisers. It is helpful that Congress has generally given the military a wide berth to conduct activities that intelligence agency paramilitaries would find objectionable.

The authorization to write the orders allow combatant commanders to put together task forces for almost any purpose, and draw from almost any existing military unit. JUWTFs are not classified and are in regular use. But until last summer, they tended to be formed for temporary and limited purposes. Even during the Bush administration, the military did not insert American personnel into Iran, which is what the Avocado execute order now permits.

"These accusations against Hekmati show only with thing: That this case is politically motivated," Abdul Karim Lahiji, vice president of the Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights, told RFE/RL's Radio Farda. "Over the last decade, there have been numerous cases like this where people were accused [by the Iranian regime] for the same reasons -- and they are usually convicted."

In an interview with RFE/RL's Radio Farda, U.S. State Department Persian spokesman Alan Eyre said the Tehran regime had a history of making political arrests and forcing detainees to make false confessions. He also said the reports of Hekmati's death sentence had not yet been verified.

"If true, we strongly condemn the verdict of the court," Eyre said. "The charges that Hekmati worked for the CIA or was sent to Iran by the CIA are laughable. The Iranian regime has a long record of confronting individuals with baseless spying charges, extracting forced confessions, and jailing innocent American citizens for political purposes."

01/07/2012

Yes, we're grateful for such intimate views, given that we only see Iran through the scrim of headlines about possible nuclear war and the revolution of 2009 seems to have died down on Twitter, or at least the Western intellectuals lost interest in it, distracted by the next bright and shiny thing.

Even so, I sort of rebel. Are people only available in their costumes with their colourful objects? Hooded wedding gowns and multicoloured draped headscarves and tambourines. There are just too many scenes where the Iranians seem like walk-ons to mass Hollywood productions, making patterns that are a delight to the eye but make us wonder what the individual thinks.

Then there is the scene of the dog-lover and the shelter, meant to help us find empathy with our Western dog-loving ways vis-a-vis this tyranny where dogs are viewed as unclean and pets a Western affectation. OK, that worked -- but what happened to the dog and the woman on the next day?

Then the scenes of more veils and corn and a pretty girl in the mountains -- and Tehran at night, lots and lots of lights in the smog, who could possibly bomb this teeming place of life?

Then a grim scene of young men with their especially-manufactured flagellators for use in the violent Ashura holy day -- seriously looking metal devices that were deliberately made in uniform fashion for this purpose. Somehow, seeing that, you feel more troubled than anything. If people flagellated themselves with their own home-made whips, you might feel the legitimacy of personal faith. But with these uniform, manufactured devices, you feel the state is keeping alive a cruel custom.

Then there's this statement:

Iranian Jewish men pray during Hanukkah celebrations at the Yousefabad Synagogue, in Tehran, Iran, Tuesday, December 27, 2011. Iran's population of 75 million includes about 20,000 Jews, the largest community in the Middle East outside Israel, and they face no restriction on their religious practice, though they must follow Islamic dress codes such as head scarves for women. They have one Jewish representative in the parliament under the constitution.

That doesn't work for me -- Ahmedinajad has urged that the state of Israel, homeland for the Jews, be wiped off the face of the map. I'm not so certain in fact this Jewish community in Iran has quite the delightful time of it as indicated with this photo and brief caption. Maybe they get to practice their faith under very strict confines that aren't some technical restriction but that don't include basic things, like traveling back and forth freely to Israel. Something is wrong with this picture...

Stained carpet-makers hands, Christians at prayer, some youths with waterguns -- well, what happened to those demonstrators and those revolutionaries? Did they all get arrested? Well, some are still left in an Internet cafe, headscarves and baseball caps -- and presumably a blank page for Facebook but communicating in other ways...